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Issues with migrating from Exchange 2007 to Exchange 2013

6th May 2013, 01:29

I'll try to provide as much detail as possible without information overload. I have Exchange 2007 with update rollup 10 for SP3. Domain prepped successfully and Exchange 2013 installed without any issues. The first problem I ran into was the whole split DNS issue with my SSL. I got the DNS zones all sorted out and that seems to be resolved now. I moved two mailboxes to test. This is where I ran into problems.

I cutover my firewall to the new Ex13 box to test all services before I moved any more mailboxes. OWA, ECP, and Autodiscover all work internally and externally. There were a few issues but I got them all resolved and they all work. I can successfully send outbound mail from my test mailboxes on Ex13 but I cannot get inbound mail to work at all. I have been through everything...event logs, receive connectors, queues, blah blah blah, and I can't find anything. Ex13 by default has the receive connector configured to accept from the internet.....yet no inbound. Finally after burning up my entire weekend troubleshooting this problem I decided to hang it up for now and cut everything back over to the Ex07 server. Much to my surprise, when all of my internal DNS records were updated and my firewall was switched back to direct my smtp traffic to the old exchange server, I was able to finally get email delivered to my test mailboxes on the 2013 server!!!

I also just read a few articles talking about coexisting servers and some things not being supported yet for Exchange 2013. Am I missing something here? Is coexistence the only way to proceed for now? Is there some silly setting somewhere that I'm completely missing? This should be a simple thing. Old server is 10.0.0.5 and new Exchange server is 10.0.0.11. I update all DNS records internally for autodiscover and mail to 10.0.0.11 and cutover port 80, 443, and 25 traffic at the firewall to 10.0.0.11. This isn't rocket science....this should simply work.....right?!?!?!?!

Any input would be appreciated at this point. I can't even begin to count how many Exchange migrations I have done from 5.5 to 2000 to 2003 to 2007 to 2010....but this is my first 2013 Exchange server and it's by far the most frustrating project/migration I've ever done.

Comment

I have tested that internally on the network and was able to successfully send a manual SMTP transaction.

We're using the Symantec.Cloud service for email encryption so my MX records actually point to Symantec. This configuration was previously in place on my Ex07 server. I contacted Symantec support to verify that their services have no knowledge of my internal network. They basically hand off to my external IP address.

I have also reviewed my firewall and confirmed that SMTP traffic is hitting my firewall rule that was configured to point to my Ex13 box. At that point I can't seem to figure out where my SMTP traffic is going. It's certainly not going to my Ex13 server.

About the only thing I haven't done is delete my receive connectors and recreate them. But I've been through those configurations over and over and have come to the conclusion that if I did recreate those connectors they would be configured the exact same way they are now.

Comment

Well, the FrontEndTransport receive connectors are basically the same as the receive connectors on my Ex07 server. The receive connectors have obviously changed on Ex13 though. It's my understanding that the HubTransport receive connectors basically hand off to the FrontEndTransport connectors. Is that correct?

Comment

The traditional Hub Transport role components have moved to the Exchange 2013 Mailbox server role. The Exchange 2013 Client Access role has some connectors but is used a way of proxying Client and SMTP connections to the relevant Mailbox server that contains the user(s) Mailboxes. For Internet Mail, you effectively configure the send connectors on the Exchange 2013 Mailbox servers to use the Client Access server(s) as a proxy to send the Internet Mail.

It is worth reviewing the Hub Transport components of Exchange 2013. I have only upgraded from Exchange 2010 SP3 to Exchnage 2013 CU1 at the moment. I believe there is a Hybrid configuration wizard for connectors that may help as well and worth a review though I have personally not used it.